Rakesh Satyal was born on August 25, 1980, to immigrant parents from India, Vinay Satyal and Lalita Satyal, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He attended Fairfield Senior High School in Ohio and graduated with a BA in Comparative Literature and Creative Writing from Princeton University, in 2002. Thereafter, he worked in book publishing and is currently an Executive Editor at HarperOne, a division of HarperCollins Publishers. He lives with his husband, John Maas, in Brooklyn, USA. He has been published in various anthologies, including The Letter Q, Fifty Writers on Fifty Shades of Grey, The Man I Might Become: Gay Men Write About Their Father, and the second volume of the Fresh Men series. He has two major publications till date: Blue Boy (2009) and No One Can Pronounce My Name: A Novel (2017). His writing primarily focuses on the struggles of both first- and second-generation queer Indian American subjects with respect to sexuality, alienation, acceptance, and community in suburban USA.